American Obsession Research Articles

Response to Professor Dinner

I want to thank the Texas A&M Law Review for including my work in this special Issue and express my appreciation to Professor Dinner for her thoughtful comments concerning the evolution of my scholarship. Professor Dinner raises the question of whether that earlier work is relevant to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, specifically, and to broader issues of reproductive justice, more generally. For me, Dobbs illustrates—once again—how our American obsession with both individual rights and Supreme Court jurisprudence can distort our sense of the possibilities for achieving social (or reproductive) justice. I see my work as an attempt to argue for a different perspective, one that might have the ability to alter or redirect that obsession. I also believe that the universal vulnerability approach has the potential to expand, and perhaps even refine, debates about reproductive justice.

“Mend this fractured family”: sin, redemption, and familial citizenship on NBC’s “The Biggest Loser”

Reality television has featured over 15 years of weight loss competitions reflecting American obsession with obesity and weight loss. Qualitative content analysis was performed on 16 premiere and finale episode pairs for six seasons of NBC’s The Biggest Loser (TBL) using a Foucauldian confessional framework. Analysis shows how TBL presents contestants as sinful, fat bodies in need of redemption with the show and the viewing audience as the confessional stage. Contestants frame their motivations for weight loss in gendered ways related to family responsibility. Women felt like role model failures, while men worried about early death and family abandonment. Season finales were the settings of redemption through extreme weight loss where women were now able to be the thin parent role models, shepherding their whole family into weight loss and men were reborn, on a path toward living forever for their families.

Simulation, Fetishism and World Domination

According to Jean Baudrillard, in a totally functional world people become irrational and subjective, given to projecting their fantasies of power into the efficiency of the system, a state of ‘spectacular alienation’. I argue that Americans as a society have accommodated themselves to such a system to the detriment of their ability to make sense in their public discourse. Baudrillard finds pathology in the system of objects as it determines social relations. In one symptom, people may obsess over a fetish object. For American society, the magical mechanical object is the gun. I show evidence for this weapons fetish in American fiction, cinema, television and serious journalism. Then, using Baudrillard and other analysts, I show how the American obsession with the superior functionality of weapons joins its myth of exceptionality and preference for simulation over reality to create a profound American dream state that protects a very deep sleep.

Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison

Reviewed by: Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison Michael Ackland CHRISTINA STEAD AND THE MATTER OF AMERICA, by Fiona Morrison. Sydney Studies in Australian Literature. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2019. 196 pp. $45.00 paperback. Christina Stead (1902–1983), although Australian born and much drawn to England and France, was well qualified to write about the United States. Her partner for four decades, William James Blake (né Wilhelm Blech), whom she met in London, was an American businessman, a Marxist theoretician, and a popular novelist, whose published non-fiction included Understanding the Americans (1954)—a subject on which he was regarded as an authority. Stead readily confessed to having profited greatly from Blake's learning and opinions, and he undoubtedly did the most to shape her views of America before they arrived there from Paris in July 1935. After less than a year they returned to the Continent, then mid-way through 1937 moved to Manhattan in time to watch the American economy slide into recession. They stayed in the United States, living on both the east and west coasts, until December 1946. Stead observed firsthand the New Deal, America's version of the Second World War, and the opening moves of what would become the Cold War. This was a crucial decade in American history and in Stead's life. Understandably, [End Page 174] then, Fiona Morrison's Christina Stead and the Matter of America is hailed on the back cover as "the first critical study of Stead's time in America" and foregrounded for its exploration of "Stead's profound engagement with American politics and culture," "gender," and "modernity" that mark her as "the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century." Inevitably Stead drew on her knowledge and experience of the United States in her writing. American settings and citizens feature prominently in five of her novels (one of them incomplete), which are the main focus of Morrison's study. Stead also wrote short stories, articles, and numerous letters about the United States and left manuscripts that dealt with diverse aspects of her experience there. Given her subject, Morrison's omission of much of this material is hard to justify and can lead to dubious claims. In addition, the critic's historical grasp of the period seems, at best, general and on crucial issues far from reliable, as when the America examined here is described stunningly as being in "transition from a buoyant and financially viable 1930s into a world of ever-increasing political and commercial difficulty" (p. 136). A deeper knowledge of the 1930s and 1940s would, in turn, have helped considerably to illuminate "Stead's profound engagement[s]" during these decades. What is at stake here can be well illustrated by one of Stead's essays on the United States that is discussed frequently and at length: "It Is All a Scramble for Boodle: Christina Stead Sums Up America." Published posthumously in the Australian Book Review in 1992, it is a fairly predictable account of the American obsession with wealth above all else: "Here, where the love of money is brutally outspoken and crassly advertised, no illusions are offered to the workers … it is all a scramble for boodle and nothing else" (p. 16). Stead is taken aback by the pervasiveness of money: "Everything is expressed in terms of money; [I am] shocked by women's pages where the money value of divorce … where the money value of children is discussed" (p. 85). These conditions, of course, are dramatized in Stead's novels such as Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) and A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948) and duly elaborated on by Morrison. However, what is passed over in silence is that this essay exists in two versions, the second being longer, thematically more diverse, and held among the Stead papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Especially striking in this manuscript version is Stead's response to broader social problems than the national obsession with "boodle." One of her major themes is an America of glaring social disparities, including destitute African Americans "buying tainted meat secretly at dusk from unpainted wagon" and images of human misery...

Claire E. Edington. Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam.

For years scholars of Vietnam were frustrated by the uneven English-language historiography of the country. Because of the American War in Vietnam (the Second Indochina War), most publications focused on the period from roughly 1963 to 1975. While the American obsession with their war is understandable, by failing to include a serious consideration of the impact of a century of French colonial rule on the roughly two millennia of Vietnamese history, the Anglophone scholarship of Vietnam was decidedly incomplete. Even the First Indochina War (1946 to 1954), the Viet Minh’s struggle for national liberation that set the stage for the American War, received less attention than it deserved. As a graduate student in the 1990s, my cohort and I had to rely on the handful of outliers who wrote about Vietnam’s history outside of the war. But even such valuable works as David Marr’s trilogy Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (1971), Vietnamese...

The ACA's Choice Problem.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is in many ways a success. Millions more Americans now have access to health care, and the ACA catalyzed advances in health care delivery reform. Simultaneously, it has reinforced and bolstered a problem at the heart of American health policy and regulation: a love affair with choice. The ACA's insurance reforms doubled down on the particularly American obsession with choice. This article describes three ways in which that doubling down is problematic for the future of US health policy. First, pragmatically, health policy theory predicts that choice among health plans will produce tangible benefits that it does not actually produce. Most people do not like choosing among health plan options, and many people-even if well educated and knowledgeable-do not make good choices. Second, creating the regulatory structures to support these choices built and reinforced a massive market bureaucracy. Finally, and most important, philosophically and sociologically the ACA reinforces the idea that the goal of health regulation should be to preserve choice, even when that choice is empty. This vicious cycle seems likely to persist based on the lead up to the 2020 presidential election.

My Most Prized Possession, an American Obsession. Virginity and the Sexual Politics of the American Teen Film.

American "teen films" and TV series can be regarded as mass consumerculture's version of literature's "bildungsroman". Their main trope isthe adolescent individual's search for identity and independence,narrated via the personal and social initiation associated with acoming-of-age experience, often ignited and/or epitomized by a sexualinitiation, most commonly in the form of virginity loss. Thus, manyteen films are negotiations of purity, chastity, and virginity—withquite mixed messages.With recourses to Jean Paul Sartre, Barrington Moore Jr., MichelFoucault, Sigmund Freud, Laura M. Carpenter and others, this paperaddresses how the transitional in-between state of adolescence isevaluated in American (popular) culture, the sexual politics of manyof these narratives, and their agency in reflecting as well as shapingadolescent sexual identities.

“Some Black, Cracked Mirror, Barely Surviving Its Own Sharp Edges”: Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn and the “Twinned,” Fractured Nature of Contemporary America

“Some Black, Cracked Mirror, Barely Surviving Its Own Sharp Edges”: Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn and the “Twinned,” Fractured Nature of Contemporary America David Buehrer (bio) Steve Erickson’s experimental contemporary American fiction has always blurred the lines between realism and surrealism on one hand and the historical and fantastic on the other. Much like the late Denis Johnson, Erickson is best known for his “visionary, post-apocalyptic novels” that “combine features of the magical realists’ exaggeration of the familiar with Faulkner’s mesmerizing rhetoric and ability to explode time and space” (McCaffery and Tatsumi 395). In fact, Erickson himself, in a 1997 interview for Contemporary Literature, has described his penchant for such skewed chronologies in his works: “Faulkner [and then García Márquez] taught me how reality ticks not to the clock of time but the clock of memory . . . ” (qtd. in McCaffery and Tatsumi 415). As critic Lee Spinks describes them, “The radical discontinuities of Erickson’s fictional narratives are . . . a consequence of his commitment to describe an incident simultaneously from the perspectives of history and memory, which no longer occupy the same imaginative space, and which often project antagonistic versions of a common future” (222–23). This simultaneity1 is certainly central to his 2017 novel Shadowbahn, the author’s tenth,2 a fictional “dreamscape of contemporary American culture” (Spinks 224) reflecting Erickson’s “concern with the relation between different historical periods [which] is underlined by the continual movement of his narrative [ ] between past, present, and future” (Spinks 225–26). As David Leo Rice, reviewing the book for The Believer, explains: “Shadowbahn marks a culmination of . Erickson’s . vision of history as a porous entity, full of glitches, wormholes, and ‘Rupture Zones,’” with the novelist’s “simultaneous histories excavat[ing] buried layers of how our reality actually is, not alternate paths it could have taken or could one day take” (Rice). Two of the main characters’ (that is, Parker and Zema’s) father, later referred to “as music’s Supreme Sequencer” (SB 211)3 and writer of the liner notes for countless song pairings he has compiled for his future-directed playlists, puts it similarly (and this reads like a succinct synopsis of Erickson’s narrative trajectory for the novel): [End Page 1] “time is a shadow-highway of successive roundabouts with After occasionally preceding Before” (SB 125). Moreover, in a 2019 interview for The Believer, Erickson comments upon the “American obsession” underlying many of his fictions, saying, “it’s particularly exhausting these days when a pall hangs over everything that I think and feel about this country that’s become . some black, cracked mirror, barely surviving its own sharp edges” (qtd. in Knipfel). The trope of the mirror, as well as other reflective dualities and “twinnings” (Maazel BR 18), takes on both self-reflexive and inter / metatextual resonances in Shadowbahn. In fact, binaries and mirror / shadow images seem to structure the novel’s otherwise fragmented, disjointed narrative, “composed [as it is] of lists, snippets of dialogue, newspaper clippings, and free-floating paragraphs” (Rice). After the “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center materialize inexplicably in the Dakota Badlands twenty years after their fall, everyone who makes the pilgrimage there—including the interracial brother and sister pair of Parker and Zema (who first appeared with their father Alexander “Zan” Nordhoc, a stand-in for “the world-famous author” himself [that is, Erickson], as he self-deprecatingly quips, in Erickson’s 2012 novel These Dreams of You)—“simply bears witness to the twin ghosts and whatever three thousand human ghosts haunt it” (SB 16). Throughout Shadowbahn, the name for “the secret highway . . . that cuts through the heart of the country with impunity” (SB 53), Erickson posits with his multiple pairings or twins—including the ghost of Jesse Garon Presley, the stillborn twin brother of Elvis, among others—“an alt-history that redefines the trajectory of American [culture and society]” at large (Maazel BR 18). More somberly if presciently, Erickson’s “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 5) also looks ahead to an extremely near future in which the once-United States (now split into separate “Union” and “Disunion” territories) is socially, racially, and politically divided or rent beyond repair— that is, to...

Zombies and a Decaying American Ontology

AbstractWhat would it mean to take zombies seriously? Cultural savants have noted the rise of the zombie in American popular culture in the twenty‐first century. And many scholars have found the zombie useful as a lumbering, empty‐headed metaphor that could signify just about anything. The zombie might look like a loved ovne, but their flesh is rotting and their individualism has tragically withered away. Before I came to zombology, I was already fascinated by an American obsession with preventing the decay of the corpse through an exceptional devotion to embalming. I argue that the intersection of the new zombie‐ism, the rapid decline of embalming, and the mass trauma of 9/11 is significant. Playing with zombies along a spectrum from fright to humor allows Americans to work through not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of being. The cult of individualism no longer needs a perfect biological body.

The Literary Roots of Southern Westerns

This article traces the literary sources of the Western movie genre in the Gothic, a predominantly Southern mode, and in 17th and 18th century American Southern literature. The moving geography of the United States, which expanded West with the gradual settlement of the Frontier, turned such border states as Kentucky the West and the South into places of encounter for the Western and the Southern. The Western genre often borrowed from Southern codes and tropes – for instance violence, individualism, and honor. Landscapes, notably Monument Valley in the Western, and the swamp in the Southern, point towards the American obsession for the dichotomy between civilization and the wilderness – a dichotomy which transcends the Frontier West.

From Memory to Memorial: Shanksville, America, and Flight 93

From Memory to Memorial: Shanksville, America, and Flight 93

James Arthur Miller (1944–2015)

Which roles have literature, music, art and film played in the struggle for equality and social justice, and what are the political roles they should be playing? What does it mean for Humanists to say that race is a social construction, and can one imagine a flexible, non-essentialist definition of race that also acknowledges the continued American obsession with it? How can a sense of modest irony make college and university teachers recognize that there is enormous variety in students’ often unpredictable responses to aesthetic works? How can a specifically local focus in American Studies generate new knowledge and motivate students at the same time? What is the mission of African American Studies now, in the academy as well as in the public arena, in national as well as international contexts? These are among the many questions that Jim Miller addressed in his life’s work, his scholarly publications, his teaching, his book-reviewing, his televised public appearances, and his academic lecturing, in the United States as well as in many other places – for his career took him to Barbados, Trinidad, Ireland, Great Britain, Holland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, and Korea.

Gilded Age of Fraternalism

The growth of the American obsession with fraternalism has been the subject of several historical treatises all seeking to understand what drew men and women into the lodge. The 1920s however, are a period that is often overlooked and neglected. Fraternalism continued to be a powerful national influence during this decade, and across the country orders received a surge of new recruits in the years following the First World War. Although their lodges had plenty of applicants, many fraternal leaders were concerned about the state of their institution in this post-war era. This article aims to analyse the evolution in the fraternal market that took place in the 1920s by examining the rapidly modernizing society of the Jazz Age and discussing the changing priorities of America’s men and women.

The Development of the Octane Number Tests and their Impact on Automotive Fuels and American Society

Modern automobiles and fuels were shaped heavily by the development of the octane number tests. These tests were developed between 1929 and 1932 to quantify a fuel’s anti-knock performance in spark-ignition engines. Since knock imposes limits on the maximum engine compression ratio, which correlates to engine performance, the anti-knock property of a fuel is a crucial design constraint. Prior to the development of the octane number tests, engines were designed to run at very low compression ratios to avoid knock, significantly limiting their performance. The octane number tests created standards that allowed for better engine development and advancements in fuel technology. Engines could now be designed to handle a specific octane number of fuel allowing for increased performance. The demand for better performing engines resulted in an increase in the average fuel octane number from 50 to 75 during this period, with the Great Depression and World War II setting the stage for this advancement. These advancements in fuel technology played a crucial role in the survival of the American automobile industry during the Great Depression, the Allied success in World War II, in addition to creating the ‘American obsession’ with powerful automobiles. This paper provides an overview of knock, a historical summary on the development of the octane number tests, the corresponding advancements in fuel technology, and the implications of these advancements on American society.

In Praise of Slacking: Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks as Hallmarks of 1990s American Independent Cinema Counterculture

Some people live to work, others work to live, while still others prefer to live lives of leisure. Since the Puritans, American culture and literature have been dominated by individuals who have valued hard work. However, shortly after its founding, America managed to produce the leisurely Rip Van Winkle, who, over time, has been followed by kindred spirits such as, for instance, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Twain’s Huck Finn, Melville’s Bartleby, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, the Hippies, and Christopher McCandless. With the rise of the Indie Film movement of the 1990s, so came the rise of the slacker film. Films such as Slacker (1991), Singles (1992), Wayne’s World (1992), Reality Bites (1994), Clerks (1994), Kicking and Screaming (1995), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Office Space (1999) filled theatres over the decade with characters who take an unorthodox view of work and stress the importance of leisure in life. This essay discusses two slacker films, Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), which defined the slacker phenomenon in the 1990s and constituted two important landmarks in American independent film. While many of us may find the slacker pathetic and annoying, this essay argues that there is much value to be found in this healthy counterculture. By offering their perspectives on issues such as the Puritan work ethic, work-incited self-importance, leisure versus idleness and human relationships, Linklater and Smith join the preceding generations of slackers, providing a much needed balance to the American obsession with work and success.

Situating Race in College Students’ Search for Purpose and Meaning: Who am I?

People in the U.S. live in a racialized society whereby life experiences, economic opportunities, social relationships, and psychological rewards hinge upon a racial hierarchy that benefits Whites and often disadvantages other races. Studs Terkel once referred to race as “An American Obsession.” Therefore, it is near impossible to nurture the development of good citizens without helping them to situate the role race plays in their lives. Notably, the development of racial identity for many racial minorities is central, whereas for White students it may be peripheral. Yet, the recurring social problems that revolve around race on campuses, in our nation, and abroad touch the lives of most students during college. This article is based on the assumption that intentionally facilitating the racial identity development process for all students needs to be an essential practice for faculty, higher education administrators, and student affairs practitioners. It describes the process qualities and skills that practitioners can nurture in the environment and in themselves, as well as in students, amidst and beyond racial controversy.

David W. Ellwood. The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century.

This wide-ranging volume describes how in the long twentieth century “American symbols and stories, images, products, and people acquired a form of power that sooner or later penetrated every debate on the Old World's prospects” (p. 1). The book's main concern is with a form of “soft power” that has operated to influence economy and culture. Direct American interventions in war and occupation, and in international policy on trade, labor, and industry, are well described. However, these only provide background for how America has worked in Western Europe both as a pervasive cultural force by means of its consumer products and media (film in particular) and as a vast source of myth and symbols. The concentration is on Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. The chronology is determined by three general periods of war: 1898–1941, 1941–1960, and 1989–2009 (post-Cold War). During times of direct American interventions, but also, as David W. Ellwood argues, during times of American isolation, the United States figured in European discourses on the future, and in debates over capitalism, technology, and consumerism. Even before the Spanish-American War era that begins the book, European culture was saturated with clichés and stereotypes about the U.S. After 1898, as Western Europeans began to question their own creation of modernity, “America itself became a metaphor” for modernity and a touchstone for its contestation (p. 32). Utopian visions of America pervaded those discussions of social and economic policy seen as socially progressive or growth oriented. Dystopian views served anti-modernism. Friedrich Nietzsche decried the American obsession with products, and historian Fritz Stern critiqued U.S. mechanization and materialism. On the positive side, Antonio Gramsci saw in Fordism a model for a fairer share for workers and Leon Trotsky predicted the future triumph of Americanized Bolshevism. Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger also associated American capitalism and Bolshevism, but decried their common feature of decadent standardization and collectivization. Adolf Hitler's emphasis on spirit, culture, and national consciousness appeared to some as the perfect antidote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his America, while H. G. Wells, Léon Blum, and David Lloyd George all saw the New Deal as a model for social justice.

Making the American body: the remarkable saga of the men and women whose feats, feuds, and passions shaped fitness history

If you thought the craze was about being healthy, think again. Although Charles Atlas, Jack LaLanne, Jim Fixx, Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, and Jillian Michaels might well point the way to a better body, they have done so only if their brands brought in profits. In the first book to tell the full story of the American obsession with and how we got to where we are today, Jonathan Black gives us a backstage look at an industry and the people that have left an indelible mark on the American body and the consciousness it houses. Spanning the nation's obsession from Atlas to Arnold, from Spinning to Zumba, and featuring an outrageous cast of characters bent on whipping us into shape while simultaneously shaping the way we view our bodies, Black tells the story of an outsized but little-examined aspect of our culture. With insights drawn from more than fifty interviews and attention to key developments in bodybuilding, aerobics, equipment, health clubs, running, sports medicine, group exercise, Pilates, and yoga, Making the American Body reveals how a focus on has shaped not only our physiques but also, and more profoundly, American ideas of what fitness is.

The Biggest Loser: Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter Series, the Queer Art of Failure, and the American Obsession with Achievement

This essay spotlights the many mistakes, setbacks, and blunders that Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter experiences in various narratives throughout the series. Drawing on Judith Halberstam’s notion of “the queer art of failure,” it argues that these disappointments can paradoxically be seen as successes. The errors that Little Critter makes routinely lead him to new discoveries and accomplishments, many of which are even more fulfilling than his initial goal. In so doing, Mayer’s series offers a compelling critique of the American obsession with achievement.

Sports Psychiatry

Article AbstractBecause this piece does not have an abstract, we have provided for your benefit the first 3 sentences of the full text.It seems not unreasonable to assume that many psychiatrists are participant in the American obsession with sports at all levels, especially professional and collegiate. Increasingly frequent psychological ramifications make the topic all the more tantalizing, eg, dramatic confessions of lying about use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, tragic connections between repetitive head trauma (concussion) and subsequent depression and suicide, domestic abuse, problems associated with retirement. But most clinicians have actually treated only a few athletes as individuals, and very few indeed have been formally affiliated with teams.